Tuesday, 5 June, at 9pm Central I’ll be babbling in a hangout and taking questions. Feel free to pester me! Anything goes. Except one thing.
« Today I learned that Iowa is full of pigs and one’s figure legends must be precise and unambiguous
So what’s the deal with the hat?
Oh no! I was distracted by the captioning and didn’t see the message!
I’m doooooommmed!
Paul “Minnesota” Myers, top grade academic who’s secretly a rugged rural grandpa.
WHAT is your name?
WHAT is your quest?
WHAT is your favourite colour?
WHAT is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?
Thanks for the heads up about Carl Zimmer’s latest book.
So not a Reddit AMA?
Owlmirror @3: African swallow or European swallow?
Obviously a Monty Python fan.
You know, in the Middle Ages it was the custom for university masters to hold public disputations on the high holidays of Christmas and Easter, answering whatever questions their audiences of students put to them rather than the burning issues within their own academic disciplines (liberal arts, medicine, law or theology) that they disputed the rest of the year. This was seen as a kind of academic penance to breed humility. The exercises were called quodlibets (Latin for “whatever you want”), and the disputations were often recorded and preserved in manuscript copies by the Universities. Many sets of questions and answers still survive, and they form a fascinating glimpse into the kinds of social and culture issues that animated Medieval academics and students. Rabelais makes fun of this institution quite often in his savagely anti-scholastic satires.
It’s a bit late for the Easter quodlibet, and much too early for the Christmas one, but I suppose that’s more appropriate for an atheist master.
A perennial issue that exercised Thirteenth-century quodlibets was the wider social and theological impact of the wars and diplomatic troubles in Jerusalem, as various crusader king and princes sacked, massacred, interfered and were defeated in their turn. Aquinas himself was asked to pronounce on this several times throughout the 1270s, as were many other masters. But, of course, we don’t have anything like that to worry about now.
Oh dear PZ’s gone and turned into a philosopher. Are you sure you didn’t misspell “ontogeny” on your teleprompter. Are you going on long winded musings about Being and Becoming. States and processes? How we impose meaningful patterns onto squishy stuff such as embryos? Does Wilkins know you’re invading his turf?
So, in true Scholastic style…
1. quaeritur ex quo magister petasum obtinuit?
2. quaeritur utrum petasus compartmentum secretum habeat, et quod in compartmento nunc sit?
3. quaetitur cur petasum sic coloratum magister selectavit, et num vendor petasorum petasos alteros haberet?
4. quaeritur utrum sub petaso spectaculum horridum conceletur?
5. quaeritur quod velocitas in aere hirundini nihil ferenti est?
I’d like to see a discussion related to the this article on why we need religion .
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/03/opinion/why-we-need-religion.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region
Classic. I laughed so hard even before putting “hirundini” into google translate to make sure I was correct.
On the subject of the hat, one word: Sorting.
I’d like to see a discussion of the dangers of A.I. many people mentioned in this article are more concerned than those at this blog.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/how-frightened-should-we-be-of-ai
So, I put the whole of #10 into googletranslate to Japanese.
Pretty funny.
Well, demented, really.
Poor GoogleTranslate. I’d like to send it a nice cup of herbal tea.
Africae vel Europae?Hirundo rustica,
vel Hirundo lucida,
vel Hirundo angolensis,
vel Hirundo tahitica,
vel Hirundo domicola,
vel Hirundo neoxena,
vel Hirundo albigularis,
vel Hirundo aethiopica,
vel Hirundo smithii,
vel Hirundo atrocaerulea,
vel Hirundo nigrita,
vel Hirundo leucosoma,
vel Hirundo megaensis,
vel Hirundo nigrorufa,
vel Hirundo dimidiata . . . ??
Latin –> Japanese –> Latin –> English; last is best
5. You, as the speed of the air carries swallow this?
Distinctly Zen.